


A Deck of Many (Mighty Nein) Things

by sparxwrites



Series: Critical Role Drabble Collections [2]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Anger, Angst, Body Horror, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Choking, Comfort, Consent Issues, Corporal Punishment, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Manipulation, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, F/F, Feeblemind Spell, Fluff, Gen, Gore, Guilt, Horror, Hurt/Comfort, Immortality, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Torture, Internalised ableism, Introspection, Major Character Injury, Muteness, Nightmares, One-Sided Attraction, Pining, Poisoning, Post-Canon, Recreational Drug Use, Resurrection, Surgery, Tenderness, Unrequited Love, Vomiting, Whump, unable to die
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-15
Updated: 2020-10-24
Packaged: 2021-02-27 22:08:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 16
Words: 7,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22743022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sparxwrites/pseuds/sparxwrites
Summary: A place to put my many Mighty Nein Critical Role tumblr drabbles that are too short to deserve their own fics.1.Caleb drinks a healing potion that's gone off.2.Beau and Jester meet, briefly, post-campaign.3.Mollymauk relaxes with the aid of some dubious drugs.4.Caleb is dying, and there's nothing Beau can do.5.Caduceus makes an error with his mushroom identifications, and Beau pays the price.6.Caleb removes the shards from his arms after escaping.7.Beau thinks about Jester a lot.8.Fjord considers his patron, and his deity.9.Jester has a nightmare, and turns to Beau for comfort.10.A little Beau/Yasha h/c.11.Beau and Caleb, after an injury.12.Molly pins Caleb to a wall again, less socially this time.13.Caleb, and Trent, and power.14.Beau gets feebleminded, and Yasha looks after her.15.Caduceus ends up in the clutches of some bad people.16.In which Molly just can't seem to die.
Relationships: Beauregard Lionett/Yasha, Jester Lavorre/Beauregard Lionett
Series: Critical Role Drabble Collections [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1640677
Comments: 84
Kudos: 465





	1. Wrong

**Author's Note:**

> as always- these are all from @sparxwrites on tumblr, some from several months back. do come follow me over there if you want the best and most up-to-date content!

When Nott fishes the healing potion out of Caleb’s pack and passes it to him, he upends the bottle into his mouth and swallows greedily, gasping, barely taking time to breathe. It’s bitter as it goes down, more bitter than usual - an edge of mildew, stale rot that slicks over his tongue and down his throat. He’s in too much pain to notice, though, panting through clenched teeth. His leg throbs in time with his heart, a drumbeat of pain through his whole body as the muscles twitch around the snapped-clean bone.

He’s still gasping when the potion comes back up, thirty seconds later, stomach clenching nauseously at the _wrongness_ of it.

“Caleb!” screeches Nott, grabbing for his shoulder as he spits the taste of sour vomit and magic-gone-bad from his tongue. “Jester! Something’s wrong with Caleb!”

“ _Nein_ ,” says Caleb, unsteadily, because he felt the magic spark, felt it flood warm through his veins even as his guts twisted. “No, it is fine, I am-” The _okay_ gets lost in a burst of skull-shattering agony as he tries to move his leg and every nerve in his body screams _wrong wrong wrong_.

There’s hands on this thigh when he can next think about anything other than _pain_ , pressing down gentle but firm to stop him moving his lower leg. “Cayleb?” says Jester, and blinks his eyes open, realises the blood he can taste in his mouth is from his own lip. “Cayleb, don’t move your leg, okay? The healing potion worked funny, so your leg is healed, but it’s not _right_.”

“ _Okay_ ,” he says, and he doesn’t remember screaming but his voice is sandpaper raw. He’s distantly aware he’s shaking, trembling against the steady press of Jester’s hands. “Okay, so can you- can-”

He thinks he might be sick again, echoes of pain running up and down his spine. Nott’s claws run through his hair in nervous, fussy strokes, combing the dried battle-sweat from the long strands. He _can’t stop shaking_.

“So, we’re maybe going to have to re-break it, like, a _tiny_ bit, okay, but it will be _super_ quick and then we’ve got a healing potion that is _not_ like two years old and you will be good as new! Okay? Okay,” says Jester, in a rush. She always talks too fast when she’s anxious, and it’s hard _not_ to be, with Caleb grey-faced and shocky before her, leaning against Nott to hold him up.

Caleb sways to one side, and vomits into the grass.

“ _Ja_ ,” he says, when he’s done, wiping his mouth with the back of one unsteady hand as Nott helps him brace sitting upright once more. “ _Ja_ , okay. Do what you must, then.”

It’s obvious the calm in his voice is artificial, dissociative, the product of a period of his history that none of them want to think about. But it needs to be done, and Jester may be able to heal wounds but she’s not yet worked out how to heal _minds_. So she says nothing about it - just pats Caleb’s shoulder, sympathetic and apologetic, and calls Beau over to help hold him down.

In the end, the actual doing of it is quick. The bone, new and soft from the fresh, botched healing, snaps easily beneath Jester’s strength. Caleb screams through the belt between his teeth until Jester worries he might pass out - but then he stops, spits the belt out, and Nott is there with the potion, pushing the vial between his lips with such urgency Jester fears she might chip his teeth. The leg grinds back into place. The break heals.

Fixed, in the span of a minute.

The rest of the healing takes longer. Caleb lies there in the grass, gasping for breath and glassy-eyed, for another ten minutes before they can convince him to move. It takes another two weeks for him to move without stiffness, without a slight, hesitant limp from the lingering twice-brokenness. It takes longer, still, for Jester to be able to reach for him without him flinching. He apologises for it, every time, but his shoulders still tense beneath her hands when she heals him, like he just can’t help himself.

Jester takes to checking all their potions, after that, once a week. Just in case.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The prompt was "if ur still doing fic prompts, how about: caleb breaks a bone, snaps it clean. the healing potion in his pack has gone off. it heals him, sure, but the bone heals wrong, and it must be broken again." starting off the drabble import very on-brand!


	2. Encounter

They meet, just once, after the Mighty Nein disbands. Nine years nearly to the day after the silver-dark gathering of dunamantic magic over the Zemni Fields, after Caleb Widogast at the centre of it with arms outstretched and world-killing madness in his eyes. After Beau put a spear through his lung, to end it all, pinned him twitching and shock-pale to the ash-dirt of his family’s burnt-out home until he suffocated on his own blood to a quiet, unremarkable death.

(She tries not to think about it, these days. During her waking hours, keeping busy works well enough – at night, she either drinks herself to sleep, or pays the price for avoiding the drink.)

Jester looks hardly different from the day they parted, when Beau sees her on the streets of Nicodranas, and it knocks the wind out of her more effectively than any punch to the gut ever could. Radiant blue skin, familiar curled horns, layers upon layers of petticoats and draped sleeves and ribbons on a gown far more expensive than her adventuring fare… It’s almost like she never left, for a minute, and it steals Beau’s breath away.

When their eyes meet, though, for the briefest of seconds, the joy has gone from them, and it twists like a fist around Beau’s heart.

In that moment of recognition, Jester’s eyes widen, her mouth opens to say something – and that’s a miracle in and of itself, that she recognises Beau at all, with her shaved head, the stress-lines around her mouth and eyes, the scar bisecting one eyebrow and trailing down onto the cheek below. But then the man whose arm she is holding tugs her round to look at something, point out something on some nearby stall, and the lock of their gazes is broken as soon as it had begun.

Beau takes the opportunity to toss her hood up, melt away into the crowd. She feels, distantly, the prickle of eyes on the back of her neck, as Jester no doubt scans the crowd for her. She doesn’t stop, though, doesn’t slow, weaving her way expertly through the press of people until she can duck into a side alley and make for the roofs.

Better for the both of them, this way. _Don’t get attached_. Dairon will have to send someone else to finish the job – there’s too many memories here for Beau to stay for any longer than it takes to drown the _exhaustion_ welling up in her heart.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The prompt was "negotiation", and i was briefly possessed by the ghost of lesbian longing :c


	3. Levitate

Molly feels light as a feather, when he takes it.

What ‘it’ is, he’s not entirely clear on. A friendly shopkeep had sold it to him from across a counter covered in unusual (and mostly half-dead) plants, with a conspiratorial wink and a quirk of the lips. The advice that it was best taken smoked had been offered in a slow, sleepy drawl, as though they’d sampled a little of their own product not too long before. So Molly’d paid for it, and put it in a pocket – and then forgotten it entirely for a week or two until there’d been some downtime in the forest, and a hastily-constructed camp in the late afternoon, and a pipe amongst the loot they’d found in some strange goblin horde.

It tastes sweet, with a lingering hint of burnt oranges and hair that makes him lick his lips, wince at the charred-sugar of it, until he grows accustomed. The smoke dissipates, at least, doesn’t linger after he’s let it warm his lungs, leaving only the faintest hint of candied orange peel behind – that, and the gentlest, softest feeling that he’s hovering a few inches above the ground.

The _relief_ of it is overwhelming.

Sometimes, he doesn’t notice the weight he’s carrying until he drops it, until a little chemical assistance forces him to put it down – this is one of those times. His shoulders slump, and his eyes half-lid, and there’s a creeping sense of _peace_ that rolls over him as inexorable as the tide. The light is golden, the grass stained emerald-yellow with it, and his own hand is an _entrancing_ shade of sickly as the purple and the yellow mingle freely, and- and he is calm, and easy, and laughing at himself in the late afternoon sunshine.

He knows that it’s going to wear off eventually. He knows that, in the end, he’s going to have to come down. Nothing can fly forever, after all – not sorcerers, not dragons, not those tiny little birds with their black beaks and yellow eyes and speckled-chestnut feathers that are his _favourites_. Certainly not some tiefling, high on gods-knows what and with one foot still mostly in the grave.

It’s nice, though. To pretend that, for just a moment, he might be free of the grasping, hungry dirt that haunts his dreams.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The prompt was "levitate".


	4. Negotiation

“This is… okay, Beauregard, you know?” wheezes Caleb, softly. There’s blood on his teeth now, turned pink with saliva, and Beau can’t stop staring at it. “I am- okay. You need- need to go, go get Jester, take her back to the others. Caduceus- Caduceus can-”

He coughs, chest heaving under her hands, and the red blooms brighter over his teeth and tongue. There’s a hot pulse under her fingers, his blood seeping deeper into the cracks of her knuckles. He whimpers, eyelids fluttering, and she thinks she might be sick.

“There’s fucking _nothing_ about this that is okay, Widogast, you _stupid_ motherfucker,” she hisses, pressing down harder against the bleeding hole in his chest, ignoring the whine of pain it draws out from somewhere deep inside him. She can feel the breath rattling in his lungs, wet and dying. “You- I’m not fucking _abandoning_ you, I-”

There’s a hand around her gore-streaked wrist, the grip surprisingly strong given the amount of blood he’s lost, the lack of colour in his face, the shake in his fingers. “Beauregard,” he murmurs, and his voice is fading, the light in his eyes is fading, the last remnants of colour draining from his cheeks. “Listen- to me. I am dead already. Jester is not.” He smiles, and his lips are red. Beau isn’t crying. She’s _not_. “I do not need you to hold me as I die.”

“ _Asshole_!” she snaps, loudly, pressing down harder again – and he jerks under her fingers, crying out, eyes rolling in their sockets. Her heart hammers against her ribs like _she’s_ the one with a fatal chest wound, the one bleeding out. “Asshole, you can’t- you can’t fucking _die_ on me, not after- not-”

She remembers Molly, spread-eagle in the snow, blood-slicked from throat to groin with his insides glistening in the weak sun. Her fingers twitch, press against Caleb’s skin like she can hold it together, press the blood back inside him. The crimson on the back of her hands washes away with every drip-drip-drip of saltwater off her nose, replenishes with every fluttering, fading beat of Caleb’s heart.

His fingers twitch around her wrist, slacken a little. “Caduceus has a diamond,” he murmurs, and his eyes are fluttering closed now, the blood is coming slower now, and _god_ , Beau’s not sure her own heart won’t stop beating the same time that his does. “I will… be back, you know. I do not… need you to… hold…”

“Fuck you, Caleb,” she whispers, unsteady, her hands awash with scarlet as she leans down to press a kiss to his forehead. He’s cold, so cold, still other than the fading tremors, and his eyes track her sluggishly, pupils barely visible in the crescents his eyes have become. She can’t feel his heartbeat beneath her fingers any more, though the blood is still pooling around them. “I’m here. I’m here. I’m not going ‘til you do, okay? I’m not going anywhere. I‘m here. I’m _here_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The prompt was "negotiation".


	5. Mistake

All it takes is a single oversight, a single misstep – he fails to spot the whitish gills on the underside of the funghi he picks, a shade too pale for the brown-grey they should be for the species he thinks this is, and everything goes to shit.

Not immediately, of course. The mushrooms spend the rest of the day in the small wicker basket he keeps for this exact purpose, and then the evening hanging over the fire, gradually smoking and drying. By morning, they’re shrivelled enough to grind into a fine powder, and pour into a carefully-labelled envelope, ready for making into tea. Hooked browncaps make a delicious tea, after all, warm and rich and good for soothing the nerves. He’s lucky to have found some this far north.

Which is why, a few days later, when they’re settling down for the night and Beau is still antsy with adrenaline, sulking from not having gotten any hits in on the spiders they’d fought earlier, he makes her up a cup.

“Here,” he says, gently, handing the hot mug over and watching her suspiciously inhale the rich, earthy steam pouring off it in the chill night air. “This’ll help you relax a bit. It’s not much fun being all wound up before bed, after all.

Beau squints at the tea, and then downs half of the scalding liquid in one long gulp. “Thanks, Deuces,” she says, pulling a face at the unusual, slightly bitter taste. He simply smiles at her, nods, and goes back to tending to dinner.

Not for long, though, because a little over a minute later, Beau vomits, loudly, behind him.

“Oh,” says Caduceus, a note of disappointment in his voice as he turns around, “does it really taste that bad? I know it’s a bit odd, but-”

His mouth snaps shut, though, at the blotched pale across Beau’s face, the dark black-red of blood in the spatter of vomit across the ground. The way she’s clutching at her belly with one hand, and her throat with the other, fingers twisted in a claw-rictus of trembling pain.

“ _Oh_ ,” he says, faintly, confused and shocked into stillness for a half-second. Did she get bitten by the spiders, earlier? Has she been attacked? Is she sick? It doesn’t make any sense, he’d healed her after the fight, felt no indication of lingering illness – spider-induced or otherwise – and he can’t see any attackers. No one’s raised the alarm. There’s no reason the tea should have caused such a reaction, he thinks wildly, as Beau spasms, hunches further over and gags up another shocked mouthful of bloody bile. Hooked browncaps are relaxants, mild on the stomach-

Hooked _whitecaps_ , though, are deadly poisonous.

Guilt sends his stomach plummeting, a freefall of white panic behind his eyes, before he pulls himself together enough to cast _calm emotions_. Beau is still trembling in front of him, hunched over and retching with painfully violent shudders, and the others have noticed, now, Yasha is calling her name in concern.

“Poison!” he calls back, hoarsely, already calling _restoration_ to his fingertips. He lunges towards Beau, holds her steady as she spasms and vomits again, feels the way her chest it heaving to draw in unsteady, wheezing breaths through her tightening throat. “She’s poisoned! _Jester_!”

He presses his hands to her, one over her stomach and the other over her throat, and releases the spell. Summons it to his fingertips again, even as she gasps gratefully through bloody lips and a now-loose throat, and lets it sink into her, before pouring as much healing as he can muster into the shaking human. Time for guilt later, he thinks, as Jester skids to her knees beside him, babbling frantically even as she, too, brings magic to her hands. Right now, he has to fix his mistake.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The prompt for this was "mistake".


	6. Meticulous

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNING for surgical gore.

Caleb is careful, as best he can be. The chips are long settled in, itching, shattered beneath the skin and scarred in deep. Ten years, it’s been, he will learn later, when he is more than five desperate miles from the asylum and shaking at the edge of a river he will eventually have to ford – ten years lost to an asylum, ten years of his parents dead, ten years of things under his skin that should never have been there working their way deeper below fat and muscle.

Ten years is a long time for nerves and sinew to grow around foreign material. For gems put there without his consent to have been made part of his body.

He has a knife, stolen from a guard and still crusted with his keeper’s blood, and the stream in front of him. When he clicks his fingers once, twice, the magic curled deep inside him flickers, flares erratically, and he doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry or vomit when flame begins to burn on his index fingertip.

It’s still there. After all this time, it’s still inside him.

The knife glows cherry-red for a half-second as he passes it through the flame, and he waits a minute for it to cool. He wants to sterilise, not cauterise – this will make scars enough without searing deep holes into his arms.

Then he sets the blade to the first of the bulges in his arm, this one so high up it seems to have migrated from his wrist to the back of his hand, and makes the first incision.

He has a good grasp of anatomy, courtesy of- a man whose name he will not say, not even in the privacy of his own head. He knows where the tendons are, the major veins and arteries, and he avoids them all as he slices through the back of his hand, nearly down to the fine bones of it. He shakes, drools around the strip of fabric he’d pushed between his teeth, but keeps going until the tip of the blade grinds against a gemstone facet.

A little bit of maneuvering, a small flip of the knife-tip, and the first gem slides free – warm yellow citrine turned orange with the slick blood-film over the top of it. It hits the dirt almost soundlessly, and Caleb allows himself the brief privilege of screaming through his nose, hunching over and _shaking_.

Then he sets the tip of his knife against the inside of his wrist, and starts again.

It takes over an hour to get them all on that arm. He works steadily, meticulously, allowing himself barely a handful of seconds between each incision to give into the pain before reigning himself in. By the time the last gem hits the dirt, he is pale, swaying, arm streaked with blood and fear-sweat from the seventeen incisions.

He should stay awake, he knows, keep watch for pursuers or predators, stay vigilant. But the knife falls from his shaking fingers into the pile of bloodied gems, the cloth falls from his mouth, and he curls trembling into the dirt. He’s gone the moment his shoulder touches the ground.

He doesn’t dream.

When he wakes up, exhausted, shaking- he clicks his fingers, sterilises the knife once more, switches it to his left hand. And he starts again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The prompt was "meticulous", and i somehow managed to make it about Caleb suffering... as always.


	7. Crackle

Beau rehearses by firelight, whilst she’s on watch and the others sleep around her.

Supposedly, Caduceus is on watch with her – but he’d drunk sleepy-tea with dinner by accident and, despite his insistence that he was wide-awake, had drifted off a scant half-hour into their watch. She’d been left alone, in the dark, somehow both bored and wired, with the fire a crackling warmth at her back.

So she sits, mouthing words into the darkness over and over as she pulls up handfuls of anxious grass down to the muddy roots, tweaking until she has the perfect formula. Rehearsing until she knows it off by heart. She holds it in her mouth, even as Yasha and Caleb relieve her of her watch, keeps her lips sealed tight lest the words escape as she lays down to sleep.

She wakes, sleep-bleary eyes set on Jester, ready to set the words free.

“Good morning, everyone!” chirps Jester, bright and breezy and terrifyingly wide-awake as always, and then pauses, grinning wide as their resident half-orc wakes and stretches, sleep-shirt riding up to show off a toned stomach and dark happy trail. “Good _moooorning_ , Fjord,” she nearly purrs, batting her eyelashes.

The well-rehearsed words Beau has been holding in her mouth turn to ashes and dust in an instant.

She eats her breakfast porridge in silence, eyes on the ground. She can’t even bring herself to look at Jester, grinning widely, tail flicking back and forth as she flirts with Fjord; she doesn’t have the heart.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The prompt for this one was "crackle", which clearly ended up having nothing to do with anything.


	8. Differences

The water still makes him uneasy.

Caduceus had asked what he’d liked about it, and he’d answered, and hadn’t lied - and it seems that Melora’s taken that to heart. He’s reborn in salt and seaweed, and it feels _right_ , but not necessarily _comfortable_. Not necessarily easy.

(He still dreams of drowning, sometimes, wine-dark seas opening up and swallowing him. There’s no eyes, now, or grasping, slippery coils around his limbs, but the hollow, hungry sea is horror enough.)

Perhaps this is just what it’s like, he thinks, being in service to a deity. Perhaps the sensation of being wielded will always feel like drowning, like a fist between his ribs dragging him along by water-soaked lungs. Perhaps this is the price you pay for being _special_ , for being wanted. For being a somebody, rather than a nobody. 

He hopes it is not- hopes Melora will be different, that her seas will buoy him rather than _consume_ , but. _But._ When he wakes from dreams of her, the sea lapping peaceful and warm at his feet, it is still to salt-sweat cold against his skin, and the phantom of slick, coiling limbs waiting to drag him to the depths.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The prompt was "100 word prompt: Fjord's new patron is a lot different to his last, but not necessarily in the ways that he'd like".


	9. Nightmares

“Beau?” asks Jester, softly, hyperaware of the rest of the group sprawled around the small dome of Caleb’s magical hut. It’s past midnight, she’s sure, because Fjord and Yasha claimed second watch earlier and are now sat a little ways outside the shimmering barrier, warming their hands over the fire in silence. It’s late enough, then, that the others will be  _ really _ annoyed if she wakes them up.

Beau included, probably.

This is important, though. It’s silly, but it’s important, and Jester isn’t sure she can face going back to sleep without–  _ something _ . Without talking to someone, or a hug, or even just a reassuring pat on the shoulder. Yasha and Caleb wouldn’t know what to do; Fjord would fumble his words; Caduceus would be  _ too nice _ ; Nott might bite her, for waking her up, and wouldn’t be any help anyways. So that leaves Beau to be woken up, because Jester had a nightmare and is too silly and scared to deal with it on her own.

The night feels cold, clammy, pressing in from every side at the mere  _ memory _ of the nightmare, though, despite the faint silver-grey of the hut around them. She shivers, tugging her night-shawl tighter around her shoulders as she gently prods Beau in the ribs.

“Mrnghh?”

Beau doesn’t open her eyes, but there’s an inquiring note to her grunt that makes Jester think she’s probably, possibly,  _ maybe _ awake. “I… can I sleep next to you?” she asks, softly. “I just– it’s kind of cold, is all, and I think maybe my bedroll is kind of damp, or has a hole, and  _ then _ there was this dream–”

Her teeth click shut with the speed she swallows the rest of that sentence. She doesn’t want to talk about it. She just wants a little comfort, is all. A little reassurance.

“Mrnghh,” mumbles Beau, eyes still closed.

“Oh.” Jester tries not to focus on the plummeting of her heart in her chest, the sick twisting of her stomach. “Okay, that’s okay! No worries, I’ll just…” Of  _ course _ Beau doesn’t want to Jester to sleep next to her. She’s woken Beau up at some horrible hour of the morning, for a silly reason, and probably she snores, or wriggles too much, or isn’t pretty enough compared to all the other beautiful ladies Beau’s slept next to, or–

Before she can crawl back to her own cold, sweat-soaked bedroll, though, a hand snaps out and grabs her wrist. “S’fine,” mumbles Beau, voice sleep-raspy and quiet. Her grip is strong enough, though, and when she tugs back the covers of her bedroll a little Jester can’t help the unsteady sigh of relief that escapes her. “C’mon, ‘s space. Warm.” She cracks an eye open, just a little, to squint blindly at Jester in the dark. “You good?”

“Yeah,” breathes Jester, crawling gratefully into the small hollow bracketed by Beau’s body on one side and blankets on the other. It’s better than her bedroll – it smells of Beau, of Caduceus’s tea that got spilled on it a few nights back, of warm, living, breathing human body. She shivers, curls a little closer. “I’m good. Just had- a dream, you know?”

Beau sighs, and tosses an easy arm over Jester’s waist. The contact makes Jester shiver, though she doesn’t know why. Beau is warm, a veritable human furnace compared to Jester’s slightly cold skin. “Mmm,” she manages, curling easily, almost  _ instinctively _ , around the tiefling now taking up half of her bedroll. “‘Kay. No more dreams. Sleep now.”

It takes a minute for Jester to steady her suddenly pounding heart, her suddenly hitching breathing. The way they’re curled together leaves her with her face pressed to Beau’s chest, and she’s abruptly,  _ acutely _ aware of the way Beau must be able to feel her every exhale against her skin. What does she think of it? Has she even noticed? Is it annoying her? Does she find it soothing?  _ Does she find it– _

“O-okay!” whispers Jester, once she’s got her racing thoughts in order, recovered from the brief, inexplicable fluttering in her chest. “Okay, sleep now. Good night! …Thank you, Beau.”

“Mmm,” mumbles Beau, already half-asleep again – if she was ever more awake than that to begin with. “G’n.” No more than a minute later, her breathing evens out into the distinctive rhythm of sleep, body gone lax and still where she’s half-curled around Jester beneath the blankets.

It takes Jester a little longer to settle, the dark memory of her dream washed away by the puzzle of her racing heart. But, eventually, settle she does, lulled back to an easy sleep by the steady beat of Beau’s heart under her ear.

If she dreams, this time, held in the warm circle of Beau’s arms, she doesn’t remember it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The prompt was "Some beaujester hurt/comfort please? Maybe one of them wakes up from a nightmare or something?"
> 
> Love continues to be stored in the beaujester...


	10. Hands

Beau had thought, often, about what Yasha’s hands would feel like. Big, strong, calloused, wrapped around her wrists, touching her skin, touching– well. It was something she’d considered a fair amount, eyeing the casual, easy way Yasha handled her sword with a sort of jealousy.

She wanted to be touched like that, too. Casual, easy, as natural as breathing to have Yasha’s hands on her.

When she finally got Yasha’s hands on her, though, it wasn’t exactly like she’d imagined. Wounded, sick, half-blind with the darkness and the fever-dizziness, it had taken her a remarkably long time to notice the hand slipped into hers. Longer still to realise it was Yasha’s.

There were no sparks, no mystical revelation, no sudden wash of adoration or arousal (though honestly, given the state she was in, Beau would have been impressed with her body managing either). Instead, there was– warmth, and peace, and a quiet kind of certainty. A kind of safety.

“Come on,” said Yasha, quietly, squeezing Beau’s hand briefly before tugging her, ever so gently, forward. “Not far to go now. Jester and Caduceus can help you, once you’re back.” She squeezed Beau’s hand again, encouragingly, as the monk took an unsteady step forward, her thumb sweeping over the back of Beau’s hand. “That’s it. Just keep walking.”

And Beau did– with her head down, and her stomach churning, and her ribs in agony, cursing necromancers and their shitty magic tricks in the quiet of her own head with every step. She put one foot in front of another, and focused on the feel of Yasha’s hand in hers, and just breathed.

Yasha had her, now. Everything was going to be okay.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The prompt was "Beau and Yasha holding hands".


	11. Ability

“We’re not gonna kick you out, you know,” says Beau, softly, settling down next to Caleb at the inn table. “Like… from the group. While you’re healing. Or, like, ever. You know that, right?”

Caleb turns to look at her, and it’s hard to hide her wince at the livid, scarlet scar across the front of his throat that even Jester’s healing hadn’t managed to erase. He frowns, and Beau _does_ wince, ducking her eyes to the table just so she doesn’t have to deal with the guilt of that scar. If she’d been just a _little_ quicker…

“Look, don’t- don’t look at me like that, man,” she says, quietly, scrubbing a hand over his hair. He’s just _staring_ , and she doesn’t know what to do about it. “Just- you keep- _moping_ , and sticking super close like you think we’re just gonna make a break for it or something, and we’re _not_. You’re family, we’re not gonna fucking _abandon_ you.”

The words come out a little stronger, a little angrier, than she had intended, and she sighs - only to too look up when a hand touches her shoulder.

“ _Don’t… have… to_ ,” Caleb manages, each word a laborious, barely-audible wheeze that sounds like it’s been filtered through gravel and knives. The sword had damaged his vocal cords, Jester had said, and whilst practice and time and regular healing might bring some or most of his voice back… it also might not. That he might be stuck forever, with a throat full of sand, and no words for his spells.

Beau sighs again, grinding the heels of her palms into her eyes. “Fuck, dude, I know we don’t _have_ to,” she says, exasperatedly. “But we’re _going_ to. Because you’re family, and because for some fuckin’ reason I’m kinda attached to you and your whole scrawny hobo shtick now, so. You’re stuck with us. We’re gonna keep hanging around you, whether you get your voice back or not, spells or no spells, understand?”

She realises, with a shock, that Caleb is _smiling_ at her. It’s a thin, tight sort of thing, but it’s first smile since his injury. It loosens a tightness in Beau’s chest that she hadn’t even known she was carrying.

He withdraws his hand from her shoulder, catching her wrist instead - and when he draws a smiling face in her palm and then, hesitantly, the unsteady shape of a heart, she thinks for the first time in a week that things might just be okay.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The prompt was "caleb + losing his ability to cast spells? maybe his voice is gone, maybe his hands are injured, maybe it's a curse, maybe it's something else...". 
> 
> (God, it is Truly Embarrassing the degree to which this whole collection is just Caleb (and sometimes Beau) getting dunked on, huh...)


	12. Claws

“ _You used to work for him_?” hisses Mollymauk, and it’s Infernal layered with Common and just a hint of tiefling magic, and Caleb feels his ears begin to bleed as the words hit them. “ _And you didn’t_ tell _us?_ ”

“I- I, _nein_ , that is-” gasps Caleb, and oh, _oh_ , it’s so _easy_ to forget that Molly is a beast, a monster, until those prettied-up claws are grasping sharp around your throat. He can’t breath. There are claws against his neck, digging blood-spots into the delicate skin of his pulse, and he _can’t breathe_.

“He’s got _Yasha_!” Molly’s voice cracks on her name, and it’s all in Common now, though the words still hiss and crackle like the Brass City’s forges with the heat of his anger. “He’s got Yasha, _right now_ , he could be hurting her, he could be magicking her, he could be _torturing_ her- Was that what you did for him? Help him torture people, mess with their heads? Help him _catch traitors_? Is that what you _still_ do?”

Caleb wheezes, through the claw-clamp of Molly’s hands around his throat, eyes wide and lips purpling as his own blunt, human fingernails barely scratch skin where he claws at Molly’s hand. “It is-” he gasps, struggling to breathe through the hand around his throat, struggling not to panic as his lungs begin to ache. “It was not like that- I did not- _would not_ -”

“It _wasn’t like that_?” asks Molly, and the usually-pleasant lilt of his accent is sandpaper-rough where he presses his lips against Caleb’s ear. For a half-second flash, Caleb is almost afraid he’ll bite it off, lobe and cartilage and all. “ _No_? Then tell me, Caleb – what _was_ it like? Hmm? _What was it like_?”

And Caleb, choking, hemmed in by Molly and claws and the crushing weight of his own guilt, has no answers for that. He only has his own fingernails, bitten-ragged and blunt, and the fire-flash of oxygen starvation at the corner of his vision, and the soft, insidious voice of Trent Ikathon in the recesses of his brain that whispers _you deserve this_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The prompt was "claws". Not sure whether this is an au or a nightmare or what, but it's Something.


	13. Polite

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNING for Trent Ikithon and child abuse.

“It’s not polite to ask impertinent questions, child.”

Caleb is not a child any more – sixteen is not a child, sixteen is a _man_ – but he does not quarrel. “Yes, Magister Ikathon,” he says, voice as steady as he can manage, as devoid of any traces of a Zemni accent as he can manage. He is not a child any more, or a student. He is one of Magister Ikathon’s chosen, and he _will_ act like it. “Sorry, Magister Ikathon.”

The wood of the desk is warm beneath his palms, and it only makes the rest of him feel colder. More exposed.

“As you very well _should_ apologise, for such rudeness,” agrees Magister Ikathon, and Caleb flinches at the sharp _hiss-swish_ of a switch cutting through the air, too-fast, without the tension-release of a solid hit at the end of its path. “But as I’ve told you before, just apologising is no good. There _needs. To be. Discipline. To back. It up_.” He punctuates the words with the cane, tapping the thin rattan against the side of the desk.

The high vibration-rattle of it nearly makes Caleb flinch. Nearly, but not quite. _Please_ , he thinks, desperately. _Please Gott, just let the pain start, and then let it be done._ “Yes,” he says, “Magister Ikathon. Of course, Magister Ikathon.”

He is not made to wait. Magister Ikathon grunts, a soft noise of dismissive acknowledgement, and then the _hiss-swish_ of the switch is back – except this time it ends its path on Caleb, on the soft, thin-scarred skin of his bare arse, just above the join-curve where it meets his thigh.

Caleb does not cry out, but it is a near thing. Instead, he bites his lip, feels it bruise and split beneath his teeth, and braces himself. This is far from over.

Magister Ikathon beats Caleb bloody (twenty blows to thoroughly break the skin) and then some (twenty more for the message to sink in). Caleb counts every one out loud, voice steady and terrifyingly clear through the pain and the blood, and thanks Magister Ikathon for the correction when it is done.

He does not flinch. Does not cry. Does not let his voice or his words betray weakness. By the end of it, he is hazy with pain, weak and woozy with the heavy, cloying shock that wraps around his head like a muffling blanket. His legs are shaking, fine tremors running through his bloody thighs, and he thinks he has bitten his tongue. He tastes blood. The world around him is not as it should be, soft and warped and fuzzy as he struggles to pull his shock-shaky thoughts into line.

By the end of it, though, Magister Ikathon looks almost _proud_ – despite the bruise-welts on his student’s ass and the blood running down his legs, a clear sign of an undisciplined mind.

Caleb near _glows_ under the weight of that almost-approval, as he straightens unsteady and aching from the desk and forces himself to walk slow, steady, without a limp, out of the study, dripping blood as he goes. He is brave. He is worthy of Magister Ikathon’s almost-pride. He is a man, not a child, and he will remember, this time, not to ask impertinent questions again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The prompt for this was "polite". As the old saying goes, you can lead a fic-writer to water, but you can't make them drink...


	14. Feeblemind

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNING for some consent issues associated with feeblemind.

“Beau,” says Yasha, gently. “Stop it.” And then, when the monk doesn’t respond, “Beau. _Beau._ Stop it.”

Though she might not be able to understand words right now, Beau clearly understands when she’s being talked to. She pulls her head away from where she’s enthusiastically kissing and licking her way along Yasha’s clavicle and squints up at the barbarian - and there’s a _fear_ behind the enthusiasm-arousal in her eyes that makes Yasha’s gut twist uncomfortably, even as Beau makes to continue with her evident foreplay.

Yasha sighs, and puts a hand between them, catching Beau’s face and guiding it away from her skin.

“No.” The noise Beau makes at being denied breaks her heart, and in any other situation- well. She’d be lying if she said _this_ situation hadn’t had an effect on her, Beau’s eagerness and touching and whining. But it would also break her heart if Beau awoke from this magic and felt wronged or violated; if Beau knew that Yasha hadn’t protected for her and cared for her the same way Yasha would want to be cared for if their situations were reversed. “No, I know you want- this, but that’s not a good idea. Not right now.”

Beau whines, paws at her chest, the buttons on her top and then lower until her fingers find the waist of Yasha’s pants. There’s a desperation to her movements, and Yasha remembers, in a sudden flash, all the other times Beau has tumbled out of a traumatic situation and straight into bed with someone.

Yasha’s not entirely sure what her feelings are for the monk, not yet, but… whatever they are, she’s not interested in being used for _that_.

“ _No_ ,” says Yasha, more firmly this time, catching the monk’s wrists and holding tight. “I told you to stop it.” There’s no heat in her voice, just patient calm - and this time, when Beau makes an indignant noise at the restraint, she sighs, and leans in, and kisses her.

Unsurprisingly, that quietens Beau, and she leans into the kiss enthusiastically, pulling back after a moment to rub her cheek against Yasha’s. It’s like a cat, a little, and Yasha thinks of Frumpkin, and Beau, and has an idea. 

“You want a distraction, right?” She tugs on Beau’s wrists, manhandles the other woman into her lap carefully, so carefully, even though she’s sure Beau could snap her like a twig if she really wanted to. Yasha’s strength is with the sword, after all, but Beau’s is with her hands, and it awes Yasha every day to see how casually Beau can switch from careful to lethal with them.

“There,” she says, with quiet satisfaction, Beau’s attempts to undress her foiled by the fact the monk’s back is now against her chest, Yasha’s arms wrapped around her torso to lightly restrain her. “Even when you’re like this… I don’t want to say no to you. But it’s not right. Not now.” She raises a hand, almost absently, and rubs fingers across Beau’s scalp, focusing on the shaved bits the way she knows the other woman likes. “It’s no good to be doing that now. …And, you know. If you remember this, when you wake up, you can… you can always ask me again then. Maybe with words, that time, though.”

She feels Beau fight her for a second, wriggling against the arm around her indignantly, apparently still full of restless fire and feeling - and then she submits, slumping back against Yasha. She leans into the touch against her hair with a sigh, humming low in her chest, and lets Yasha pet her slow and steady and even until she drifts into a blank, easy sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The prompt was "beau being feebleminded and yasha's the only one she feels safe around and keeps on nudging her and rubbing up against her and mewls so pitifully and yasha doesn't want to take advantage of her while she can't even form words, but her fingers are wandering and beau keeps planting kissess along her shoulders and neck?". 
> 
> I had some moral compunctions about them having sex with Beau feebleminded, so this ended up Cuddly.


	15. Tight

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNING for mild torture and implied rape.

“Oh _fuck_ , he’s tight,” says a voice from somewhere above him, somewhere behind him – and Caduceus can’t hold back the blood-wet rumble of pain that builds in his chest. He _wants_ to cry out, wants to ask them _why_ , wants to _understand_ , but there’s a spike of bitter metal through the tender underside of his jaw and into his soft palate, and all he manages is to tear his tongue open further, flood his mouth once more with blood.

 _It’s because I’ve not done this before_ , he wants to say, as the blunt claws on the tips of his fingers scrape soft against the flagstones beneath him. _It’s because this is new, what you’re doing to me, and I don’t think I like it, and I’d really rather you stopped now_ -

But this is not his forest, and these are not his friends, and he cannot speak. They do not stop. The motion continues, splitting him, _forcing_ him, and he rumble-whines through the pain in his jaw and the confusion and the growing fear as the blood soaks into the soft fur of his thighs. The splitting stops, recedes, and then renews, over and over and over, until he thinks he might go mad with it.

His claws flex blunt against the floor. He bleeds. He cries out. He wants to think that he is not crying, because this seems such a small thing to cry over – this is part of life, after all, and death, and life over again, and is besides far milder than a sword through his middle in the heat of battle – but it’s _wrong_. He doesn’t understand it, not really, but some crying-animal part of him knows that it is at its least pain, and indignity, and _violation_ \- and so he cries.

The man above him, behind him, doesn’t seem to notice. The splitting is easier now, slicked with blood, helped by the way he’s slumped relaxed and senseless from the stress of it, eyes wide and placid, ears still and fingers gone lax. He doesn’t know what else to do – if he fights, they kill him; if he screams, his tongue tears; if he begs, no one hears but him. He is helpless. He is still. He is _prey_.

The man finishes, pulls away, moves on. Another takes his place, and the splitting resumes, blood-slick and wrong and cyclical. Caduceus dies, is filled with life, dies again.

And through it all, he doesn’t move.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The prompt for this was "tight", which snowballed into this because a friend and I had been talking about how Caduceus would deal with torture. Sorry Cad :c


	16. Trapped

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNING for being buried alive.

It’s dark, when Mollymauk wakes up.

There’s dirt all around him, soft and waterlogged and cloying, pressing in from all sides. It pins down his chest, crushes his feet – and, though it’s only a shallow grave, he feels like the weight of the world is upon him.

He heaves, struggles, draws in a frantic breath that leaves him grit-mouthed and gasping for oxygen he can’t seem to find. His fingers find heavy, wet mud, laced through with stones, and he tears a water-soft claw off on one as he digs and scrapes in short, aborted jerks.

There is nowhere to go. Nothing to do. He _cannot move_.

His hair tugs out in sheets when he tries to turn his head - or perhaps it was already gone, sloughed loose as his body decomposed before its _magical_ resurrection, little more than a pillow for his rotting skull. The thought sparks another stirring of panic; he feels whole, feels alive, but what if he is _decaying_ , decomposing, a softened and slimy corpse trapped in a pit from which it cannot escape?

He loses time, then, thrashing and gasping, whimpering and wailing with what little air he has left in his lungs – until he suffocates, sharply, with a punch of agony to his lungs and a glowing red-black behind eyelids sealed shut with mud and slime. It shocks him to blankness for a moment, a brief respite of peaceful drifting, of reaching for the shining lattice of the Divine Gate with hands that shake and decay and slough down to the bone even as he stretches them out desperately, until-

It doesn’t take him long to realise, as he chokes back to life on dirt and carbon dioxide and worms in his lungs, that he just can’t seem to _die_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The prompt was "trapped". Major props to a Torchwood episode for the inspiration.


End file.
